Reframing the Victorians: death

Showing posts with label death. Show all posts

Friday, 27 November 2015

“I struggle, bound by that terrible powerlessness which paralyses us in our dreams”: Paralysis in the Nineteenth Century

Paralysis was studied in nineteenth century art, literature, psychiatry, demonology, medicine, and (pseudo-)sociology. Having no definite form, and eluding the empiricism of medical treatment, paralysis played on many of the Victorians’ worst fears. As such, it occupied a prominent position in the Gothic canon of the era, from the stories of Guy de Maupassant and Edgar Allen Poe, to the paintings of Henry Fuseli. It was also a topic of ferocious interest to the scientific community, with pathologists, alienists (an early (and far better) name for psychiatrists), demonologists and physicians all vying to prove that the root-cause could be explained through their discipline. Two kinds of paralysis that horrified and fascinated both camps, were general paralysis of the insane (GPI), and sleep paralysis. I’ll be tracking this morbid strand through nineteenth century art, touching upon Maupassant’s death, Nietzsche’s mental collapse, premature burial, and, of course, Fuseli’s horse.

Fuseli's horse

GPI

General paralysis of the insane is defined in the Dictionary of Nursing as “a stage of tertiary syphilis characterized by dementia and spastic weakness of the limbs.” However, this syphilitic link wasn’t accepted by Victorians until the 1880s: prior to this, they considered it a “complication of insanity” (as if insanity weren’t complicated enough). This assumption, and the name of the disorder, came as a result of the prevalence of the condition in Victorian asylums. This table shows the severity of GPI in 1859:

Statistics of deaths in asylums, 1859

As can be seen from the percentage of deaths from general paralysis, the mortality rate attributed to the condition was astronomical: as many as 4.65% of patients in asylums in England were dying from GPI. Considering that the highest number of deaths from all other causes was 12.2%, GPI was clearly the primary killer. To make the threat of this incurable, deadly, and elusive disorder even more terrifying to the artists of the era, there was a received wisdom in the nineteenth century that “brain workers” (people who use their brains for work rather than their hands) were more at risk from GPI than others. Studies such as this (below) from 1928, moved to disprove this theory through sociological research into those killed by GPI. As can be seen from the table, the percentage of observed “upper class” (presumably “brain worker”) deaths from the condition was actually lower than the percentage of observed deaths in “skilled workmen” and “unskilled workmen”. While studies like this made it apparent that theories about the increased susceptibility of “brain workers” were nonsense, this sort of research wasn’t carried out until the 1920s. On top of this, a cure wasn’t in sight until the discovery of penicillin in 1928 (which eventually wiped GPI out in developed countries) by which time the condition and the fear surrounding it had produced a profound effect on the arts.

Percentages of deaths by GPI through the classes

Guy de Maupassant's death certificate

The spectre of death-by-paralysis haunted nineteenth-century literature. Guy de Maupassant, the French short story writer, processed his fears over his longstanding syphilitic symptoms through his work, which frequently featured characters suffering with paralytic or cataleptic disorders. This is grimly prophetic considering Maupassant's death certificate (pictured, left) lists his cause of death as GPI. He was syphilitic for a great chunk of his writing career, and experienced hallucinations, migraines, and fits of paralysis. His short story “Who Knows”, written in 1890, 3 years before his death, exhibits symptoms of GPI. Luis-Carlos Alvaro pointed this out in his article on neurological conditions in Maupassant's work: “Maupassant’s neurosyphilis (GPI) had advanced and its visual and mental symptoms were clearly developed.”

Guy de Maupassant, and his moustache

“Who Knows?” follows the mental collapse of its central character on his return from a night out. He’s walking home when he begins to hear a “humming noise”. The intensity of this experience steadily escalates until he sees his armchair “waddling […] through [the] garden”. Alvaro attributes these descriptions to Maupassant’s experience of migraines, hallucinations, and “elaborate visual phenomena”, through his accelerating neurosyphilis. GPI would go on to claim Maupassant’s life; but perhaps the more threatening aspect of the condition for masters such as Maupassant, was its capacity to turn the mind against itself.

Friedrich Nietzsche, and his moustache

Another figure suffered an almost concurrent collapse under GPI: Friedrich Nietzsche (lower right), the German philosopher. Nietzsche, although not considered so in his lifetime, was one of the premier thinkers of the nineteenth century. A professor of philology by the age of 24, he crammed his intellectual achievements into a very short career. Like Maupassant, Nietzsche spent a good chunk of his life with syphilis (also, curiously, both had magnificent moustaches). This is generally considered to have developed into GPI, which took his sanity and eventually his life, although this diagnosis has been challenged by more recent studies. Nietzsche was only 44 when he suffered his initial breakdown in 1889, after which his behaviour was drastically altered: he spoke to himself and wrote bizarre letters, signing them as “The Crucified One”. He was admitted to Basel mental asylum in January 1889, before being transferred to Jena, where his condition worsened. He had a confused concept of his identity, and he repeatedly urinated and soiled himself, usually proceeding to eat the faeces and drink the urine. He spent the final years of his life in the care of his family, dying in 1900. Nietzsche’s decline further demonstrates the fearful prospect that GPI represented to the genius in the nineteenth century.

Sleep paralysis

Fuseli's The Nightmare

Sleep paralysis was defined by Samuel Johnson in A Dictionary of the English Language (1755) as “nightmare”. This definition is played with in the 1781 Henry Fuseli painting The Nightmare (left). In the piece, a demon sits astride a sprawled, unconscious maiden (and the eponymous mare leers behind). This presents fairly accurately experiences of sleep paralysis; one is accosted in a state of vulnerability by some assailant, often demonic, who sits astride one, often throttling or otherwise assaulting the victim. The horse may be peculiar to Fuseli.

Maupassant described a similar experience in his short story “The Horla”:

I sleep ... a long time ... then a dream ... no ... a nightmare lays hold on me. I feel that I am in bed and asleep ... and I feel also that somebody is coming close to me, is looking at me, touching me, is getting on to my bed, is kneeling on my chest, is taking my neck between his hands and squeezing it ... squeezing it with all his might in order to strangle me. I struggle, bound by that terrible powerlessness which paralyses us in our dreams; I try to cry out - but I cannot; I want to move - I cannot; I try, with the most violent efforts and out of breath, to turn over and throw off this being which is crushing and suffocating me - I cannot! And then suddenly I wake up.

This is almost an exact reconstruction of Fuseli’s Nightmare (minus the mare). Alvaro interprets this dream as a manifestation of “anxiety bordering on a panic attack”. This both further characterises Maupassant’s experience of neurosyphilis, and points towards a more cultural sickness; the fear over the dormant self. The rise of “alienists” in the medical sphere prompted a growing awareness of the unconscious mind; and with awareness, came fear. What was this uncontrollable segment of the brain up to? Hence, this fear over sleep expressed a fear over the unconscious mind -- linked to another rising fear, over premature burial.

Premature burial

A diagram showing the function

An advertisement for a safety coffin

The word for the fear of being buried alive is Taphophobia, and in the nineteenth century, it was rampant. There was a thriving trade in safety coffins (left and right), which allowed the cadaver to signal to those above ground that it wasn’t dead, if it should cease to be so. There was also a Society for the Prevention of People Being Buried Alive, founded 1896, and a Hospital for Doubtful Life, opened 1792, where corpses were kept in warm surroundings until they began to rot. Just to make sure.

Edgar Allen Poe, seizing upon the widespread fear over live burials, wrote a short horror story called “The Premature Burial” in 1844. In this story, the narrator recounts a few horrific tales of premature burial, before revealing that “for several years I have been subject to attacks of the singular disorder which physicians have agreed to term catalepsy”. Catalepsy is defined as “a condition of suspended animation”, in which the body can, for months at a time, assume the appearances of death. The narrator fears that this condition will lead to his premature burial: “I talked ‘of worms, of tombs, of epitaphs’”. His fear, however, centres not around the fits of catalepsy that seize him in his waking hours, but around sleep: “When the nature could endure wakefulness no longer, it was with a struggle that I consented to sleep – for I shuddered to reflect that, upon waking, I might find myself tenant of a grave.” The narrator is not primarily fearful of the deception of his body, but of his mind; and more specifically, his unconscious mind. The narrative proceeds, with the narrator taking increasingly paranoid and drastic measures to pre-empt his premature burial. Eventually, he experiences what he thinks is premature interment, only to realise after minutes of panic that he is merely sleeping in a cramped berth on a boat. The horror of thinking that he had been buried alive causes him to embrace life anew: “I dismissed forever my charnel apprehension, and with them vanished the cataleptic disorder, of which, perhaps, they had been less the consequence than the cause.” This demonstrates neatly the syndrome often expressed in sleep paralysis at the time: fear over the unconscious mind led to frightening unconscious activity, and a cycle began.

What GPI, sleep paralysis, and premature burial all prompted, was a fear of the unknowable. Paralysis negated and resisted both literally and metaphorically the ceaseless onward-motion of the nineteenth century, and thus occupied a ghostly space in Victorian art, science, and minds.

Works Cited

Álvaro, Luis-Carlos. "Hallucinations and Pathological Visual Perceptions in Maupassant's Fantastical Short Stories- A Neurological Approach."Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 14.2 (2005): 100-15.MedicLatina [EBSCO]. Web. 30 Oct. 2015.

Bondeson, Jan. Buried Alive: The Terrifying History of Our Most Primal Fear. New York: Norton, 2001. Print.

"catalepsy". Dictionary.com Unabridged. Random House, Inc. 27 Nov. 2015. <Dictionary.comhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/catalepsy>.

Hurn, Juliet D. The History of General Paralysis of the Insane in Britain, 1830 to 1950. Thesis. Thesis (Ph. D.), 1998. N.p.: n.p., n.d. UCL Discovery. Web. 30 Oct. 2015. <http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1349281/1/339949.pdf>.

Johnson, Samuel. "Nightmare." A Dictionary of the English Language. 1755. Johnsonsdictionaryonline.com. Web. 28 Oct. 2015. <http://johnsonsdictionaryonline.com/?page_id=7070&i=1363>.

Martin, Elizabeth A. "General Paralysis of the Insane." Oxford Dictionary of Nursing. Ed. Tanya A. McFerran. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2014. Oxford Reference Online [Oxford UP]. Web. 5 Nov. 2015.

Maupassant, Guy De. Complete Short Stories of Guy De Maupassant. Garden City, NY: Hanover House, 1955. Print.

Mckinlay, Peter L. "The Proportional Frequency of General Paralysis of the Insane and Locomotor Ataxia in Different Social Classes." Journal of Hygiene J. Hyg. 27.02 (1928): 174-82. PubMed. Web. 27 Oct. 2015.

Orth, M., and M. R. Trimble. "Friedrich Nietzsche's Mental Illness -- General Paralysis of the Insane vs. Frontotemporal Dementia." Acta Psychiatrica Scandinavica Acta Psychiatr Scand 114.6 (2006): 439-44. Academic Search Premier [EBSCO]. Web. 29 Oct. 2015.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Stories and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1966. Print.

"taphophobia". Dictionary.com's 21st Century Lexicon. Dictionary.com, LLC. 27 Nov. 2015. <Dictionary.comhttp://dictionary.reference.com/browse/taphophobia>.

Images Used

Brushfield, Mr. An image of Mr Brushfield's Statistics of Asylums for 1859. Digital image. PB Works. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2015. <http://victoriancontexts.pbworks.com/w/page/12407425/Mr%20Brushfield%27s%20Statistics%20of%20Asylums%20for%201889>.

Fuseli, Henry. The Nightmare. Digital image. TeachArt Wiki. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Oct. 2015. <https://teachartwiki.wikispaces.com/The+Nightmare--Henry+Fuseli>.

Image of an advertising flier for safety coffin. Digital image. Grave Matters. N.p., n.d. Web. 20 Nov. 2015. <http://www.marjoleinplatjee.com/2015/08/>.

Image of Guy de Maupassant's death certificate. Digital image.Allposters.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 7 Nov. 2015. <http://www.allposters.com/-sp/Death-Certificate-of-Guy-De-Maupassant-1850-93-7th-July-1893-Detail-Posters_i10073544_.htm>.

Image of sketch of safety coffin operation. Digital image. Gothic.life. N.p., n.d. Web. 21 Nov. 2015. <http://gothic.life/why-victorians-had-bells-on-their-graves/image/1/>.

McKinlay, Peter L. Cropped image of table from journal article. Digital image.NCBI. PMC, n.d. Web. 3 Nov. 2015. <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2167761/?page=5>.

Unknown. Image of 1883 photograph of Guy de Maupassant. Digital image.Exilio. N.p., n.d. Web. 4 Nov. 2015. <http://exilioss.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/guy-de-maupassant-18501893.html>.

Unknown. Image of photograph of Friedrich Nietzsche. Digital image.Dasein.is. N.p., n.d. Web. 29 Oct. 2015. <http://dasein.is/nietzsche/>.

Bibliography

Adler, Shelley R. Sleep Paralysis: Night-mares, Nocebos, and the Mind-body Connection. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2011. ProQuest Ebrary. Jan. 2011. Web. 15 Oct. 2015.

Andrew Roberts. "Mental Health History 1842-1844." Andrew Roberts' Web Site. N.p., n.d. Web. 27 Oct. 2015. <http://studymore.org.uk/4_13_ta.htm>.

Frenzel, Ivo, and Joachim Neugroschel. Friedrich Nietzsche: An Illustrated Biography. New York: Pegasus, 1967. Print.

Hide, Louise. "Making Sense of Pain: Delusions, Syphilis, and Somatic Pain in London County Council Asylums, C. 1900." Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 0.15 (2012): n. pag. Open Library of Humanities. Web. 20 Oct. 2015.

Hirsch, Harold L., and Lawrence E. Putnam. Penicillin. New York: Medical Encyclopedia, 1958. Print.

Lerner, Michael G. Maupassant. New York: G. Braziller, 1975. Print.

McDowall, T. W. "Trephining Followed By Drainage Of The Subarachnoid Space In General Paralysis Of The Insane." The British Medical Journal2 (1893): 462-63. JSTOR [JSTOR]. Web. 28 Oct. 2015.

Myrone, Martin. Gothic Nightmares: Fuseli, Blake and the Romantic Imagination. Ed. Christopher Frayling and Marina Warner. London: Tate, 2006. Print.

Wolf, Peter. "Epilepsy and Catalepsy in Anglo-American Literature between Romanticism and Realism: Tennyson, Poe, Eliot and Collins." Journal of the History of the Neurosciences 9.3 (2000): 286-93. Academic Search Premier [EBSCO]. Web. 27 Oct. 2015.

Victorian Death Rituals and Superstitions

From avoiding the mixture of red and white flowers in a vase to keeping the door unlocked after a funeral, superstition evidentially played a key role during the Victorian times. However, the question is, to what extent did the Victorians associate death with superstition?

Historical evidence would suggest that the Victorians were weary of the dead and relied heavily on superstitious beliefs, to shield them from any harm that could potentially be inflicted upon them. Death was extremely common within Victorian society, due to the severity of class distinctions and lack of effective medications available for (as Fraser McAlpine lists them in his article “Five Horrible Diseases you might have caught in Victorian England”) “Cholera”, “Typhoid”, “Smallpox”, “Scarlet Fever” and “Measles, Mumps and Rubella”.

A drawing of children with fatal Victorian diseases.

The Victorians were surrounded by death, but this arguably served to heighten their anxieties; Jackie Pennington’s blog “Victorian Superstitions- Why Death was so Important” thoroughly explores this idea. In the process of removing the deceased from the family home, their bodies “were carried out of the house feet first to prevent them from beckoning another family member to follow”. Why would someone who adored and cherished their deceased relative believe they would purposely manipulate the living? Surely to beckon another family member and to therefore wish death upon the living, suggests that the Victorians believed that in death, a supernatural force overruled the once moral human. Pennington goes on to explain that “pictures and photographs of the deceased were covered or turned over to stop them [the living] from being possessed by the dead”. For ones who were supposedly admired in death, why is it that the deceased were not worshipped by the living but feared by them? Is it that many of the Victorian rituals, carried out to honour the dead, were actually fulfilments of superstitious beliefs, that meant they could live without fear of the dead coming back to possess or harm them?

This idea is a one which is vastly explored in Bram Stoker’s Dracula 1897, which plays on the fears common within Victorian society. Lucy Westenra’s (an innocent Victorian victim) initial death sees her as a “beautiful corpse” (174). She is supposedly free from Dracula’s supernatural grasp and it is through death that she is once more restored to her original beauty. However, to the readers regret, Lucy comes back from the dead as a vampire, “a demon in her shape” (228) who preys on young children and is presented through her “pointed teeth [and] bloodstained, voluptuous mouth” (228). Stoker’s cunning representation of the Gothic and supernatural adds emphasis to the anxieties associated with death, the unknown and superstition in the Victorian era.

Lucy Westenra as a vampire in Bram Stocker’s Dracula.

However, is it arguable that the Victorian’s were realistically a lot less superstitious then we would all believe. Historically speaking, the Victorians were obsessed with rituals which honoured and respected the dead.

Post- Mortem family photo.

One of the most morbid traditions of the era was the capturing of post- mortem photographs. As pictured below (left), it was common practise for the Victorians to pose alongside the deceased and was used in remembrance of their once adored relatives. The trickery behind capturing stand up corpses was to place a stand behind the dead to support them in an upright position.

Post- Mortem photo: young boy supported

However, this was not always enough to hold up the limp bodies displayed in post- mortem photos, who occasionally required additional stability; which explains why in the right hand photo the back drop appears ruffled as there is a hand holding the young boys head up in a lifelike position. Within today’s society taking photographs alongside the dead would seem macabre, so for the Victorians to, without fails, stand in unity alongside corpses reveals to what extent they cherished the dead.

Another ritual, which serves as evidence that the Victorians did not associate superstition with the dead, was mourning periods and mourning attire. As addressed in Elaine Furst’s blog “10 Fascinating Death Facts from the Victorian Era”, “A widow was expected to mourn her husband for at least two years during which time she was expected to wear black at all times with her only social agenda being at church”.

Queen Victoria is a prime example of mourning attire taken to its most extreme level. After Prince Albert’s sudden death on December 14, 1861, their servants were instructed “to dress in black for the first three years of his death. Victoria however, continued wearing black for the rest of her life”. Furst expands by stating that mourning attire came at a risk as “black dye from the crepe material sheds its pernicious dye into the sensitive nostrils, producing catarrhal diseases as well as blindness and cataracts of the eye”. Tell me, why would the Victorians knowingly risk their own health to respect the dead, if they feared them?

Full mourning attire, photographer circa 1860.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton explores the significance of mourning attire through the means of business. Due to its popularity within the Victorian period, Margaret (a young dress maker) says to Mary Barton “I’m going dark as fast as maybe. Plain work pays so bad, and mourning has been so plentiful this winter that I were tempted to take in any black work I could; and now I’m suffering from it” (46). The emphasises placed upon the price of attire alongside the regularity of death and above all Margaret losing her vision, as a result of making so many dark dresses, reveals the true extent to which Victorians would go to reverence the dead.

Furthermore, jewellery played a key role in worshipping the dead. Hair, bones and teeth of the deceased were coveted by the living and were frequently turned into items of jewellery. These mementos were accepted graciously by the Victorians and in contrast to the way today’s society would view them, the Victorians founds the brooches, necklaces, rings etc. as a respected ritual worth pursuing. To proudly wear something, that today would be considered morally wrong suggests that the Victorian era were not only obsessed with worshipping the dead but were quite possibly the most respectful mourners of all time.

Brooch from Jill Galey's collection of Victorian mourning jewellery.

Lord Alfred Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam A.H.H entirely defines the meaning of worshipping the dead. Tennyson had a transcendental relationship with his best friend Arthur Hallam which was as “dear as the mother to the son” (9, IX: 20). Tennyson prays for Hallam to “be near” (37, L: 1, 5, 9, 13) him through fear, illness and death. He conclusively wants Hallam to haunt him and this reading alone distorts the ideology that the Victorians seriously associated death with superstition. Superstition implies that the haunting of the living would successfully cause harm and possession to the dead ones relatives whereas in Tennyson’s reality, Hallam's hauntings would only serve to aid and comfort him.

Highgate Cemetery

Highgate Cemetery, which opened in 1839, was considered one of what was known as the Magnificent Seven. It provided private grounds around outer London that were not previously available for the dead. Highgate Cemetery is well known for its beauty and Landscape and as aforementioned the Victorians worshipped the rituals of the dead, and therefore spent vast amounts of money in honouring them; especially on their tombstones. Alongside the richest parts of the cemetery, including the Egyptian Avenue and the Circle of Lebanon, one of greatest example of an extravagant tombstone is the Mausoleum of Julius Beer, situated at the highest point of the cemeteries West side, costing 3 million pounds to build and featuring a golden leaf ceiling. As described by Mary Shoobridge in her blog “Highgate Cemetery: A Victorian Valhalla” after Frankfurt’s “daughter, Ada, died at the age of 8, he has this extraordinary tomb built, modelled in the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. Recently restored to its former glory, it is as fine inside as it is outside”.

Highgate Cemetery (West): Mausoleum of Julius Beer.

After 15 years of existence, Highgate Cemetery was expanded by twenty acres (named East Highgate Cemetery) due to its popular demand and income. As Shoobridge explains “a tunnel beneath Swain’s Lane connected the new ground with the Church of England chapel in the older (West) side”. Here many more burials took place, and Highgate Cemetery soon come to be known as one of the most prominent architectural landscapes of its kind. Due to the fact that the Victorians spent so much of their income on burials presents itself as evidence that they valued and respected their dead as oppose to fearing them. However, one cannot help thinking such grand gestures were carried out in an attempt to make the dead feel appreciated so that they did not become angered and come back from the dead to haunt the living. But, with all that is considered, to what extent would you now believe that death and superstition were closely associated in the Victorian era?

Bibliography

References

Furst, Elaine. "10 Fascinating Death Facts from the Victorian Era." Listverse. General Knowledge, 7 Feb. 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2015. <http://listverse.com/2013/02/07/10-fascinating-death-facts-from-the-victorian-era/>.

Gaskell, Elizabeth Cleghorn. Mary Barton. United Kingdom: Wordsworth Editions, 8 Aug. 2012. Print.

McAlpine, Fraser. "Five Horrible Diseases You May Have Caught in Victorian England." BBC America. N.p., 24 Apr. 2104. Web. 18 Nov. 2015. <http://www.bbcamerica.com/anglophenia/2013/04/five-horrible-diseases-you-might-have-caught-in-victorian-england/>.

Pennington, Jackie. “Victorian Superstitions- Why Death was so Important”. The Pennington Edition. Word Press, 9 May 2014. Web. 15 Nov 2015. <https://thepenningtonedition.wordpress.com/2014/05/09/victorian-superstitions-why-death-was-so-important/>.

Shoobridge, Mary. "Highgate Cemetery: A Victorian Valhalla." IndifferentReflections. N.P., 01 Mar. 2014. Web. 20 Nov. 2015. <https://indifferentreflections.wordpress.com/tag/magnificent-seven-cemeteries/>.

Stocker, Bram, Maurice Hindle, and Christopher Frayling. Dracula. New York: Penguin Group (USA), 2003. Print.

Tennyson, Lord Alfred. In Memoriam A.H.H. United States: Createspace, 14 May. 2012. Print.

Images/ Videos

Bram Stocker's Dracula (4/8) Movie Clip- Lucy the Vampyr (1992) HD. Movieclips, 7 Oct. 2012. Web. 18 Nov. 2015. <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8rlohOLUi9k>.

Cuff, Tim. Victorian Mourning Jewellery. Digital image. Sarahjryder- News from Nelson/ Tasman, New Zealand. Jill Galey, 16 Feb. 2012. Web. 20 Nov. 2015. <https://sarahjryder.wordpress.com/2012/02/16/jill-galey-collects-victorian-mourning-jewellery-clothing/>.

Ed. Victorian Diseases. Digital image. New Manchester Walks in Steps in the City. N.P., 01 Feb. 2015. Web. 18 Nov. 2015. <http://www.newmanchesterwalks.com/walks-tours/weird-and-wonderful/victorian-diseases/attachment/victorian-diseases-2/>.

Full Mourning Attire, Photographed Circa 1860. Digital image. Mourning Dress during the Early Victorian Era. R.S. Fleming, 30 Mar. 2013. Web. 20 Nov. 2015. <http://www.katetattersall.com/mourning-dress-victorian/>.

Shoobridge, Mary. Highgate Cemetery: Mausoleum of Julius Beer. Digital image. IndifferentReflections. N.P., 01 Mar. 2014. Web. 20 Nov. 2015. <https://indifferentreflections.wordpress.com/tag/magnificent-seven-cemeteries/>.

Victorian Post- Mortem Photo. Digital image. Viralnova- Your Stories Delivered Daily. N.P., 28 Oct. 2014. Web. 19 Nov. 2015. <http://www.viralnova.com/post-mortem-victorian-photographs/>.